Prime Minister Aso Taro is a firm believer in "values-oriented diplomacy," the use of Japan's foreign policy tools to promote the spread of "universal values" like democracy and human rights.As foreign minister under Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, he spoke of Japan's role in creating an "arc of freedom and prosperity," a belt of what he …
Tag: democracy promotion
A future for values diplomacy?
Daniel Twining, currently a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund and formerly an Asia policy staffer at the State Department's policy planning staff and an adviser to John McCain, offers his recommendations to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at Shadow Government, a new blog at Foreign Policy featuring the writing of conservative and Republican …
Changing terms
Following the discussion in this post from earlier this week, I found this article at the Economist website of interest.It opens by exploring the evolving terms used to describe Europe, but then shifts into a discussion of democracy, and suggests, "ban the word 'democracy', which has been worn smooth by misuse." It proposes as alternatives …
The democracy question
In light of the quashing of the "Saffron Revolution" in Burma and the Japanese government's feeble response to the violence, which took the life of a Japanese citizen, it is probably safe to declare MOFA's "value oriented diplomacy" to create an "Arc of Freedom and Prosperity" dead.But with Japan's following behind Washington in backtracking on …
Asia’s future seen in Sydney
At the OPEC APEC summit in Sydney, the leaders of APEC's twenty-one member states have been holding bilateral talks in the run-up to the final summit this weekend. I don't put much stock in APEC as an organization that will be able to deliver concrete results — it's simply too big and too diverse — …
Who is missing from this group?
In Abe's Magical Democracy tour, there was lots of talk about cooperation between Japan, India, the US, and Australia — glorious Pacific-spanning cooperation among democracies.But what about South Korea, which last time I checked was a vibrant democracy whose people struggled to achieve it after decades of authoritarian rule?It seems that any organization of democracies …
For Abe, it’s still February 2003
Gordan Chang, the anti-China polemicist writing at Commentary's Contentions blog, has a very different take than I on Mr. Abe's dangerously irresponsible community of Asian democracies.Abe's proposal, Chang thinks, is simply grand: "Is Tokyo becoming the leading proponent of a free world? Since July of last year, Japan, among the democracies ringing the Pacific Ocean, …
Tobias S. Harris 